


In Another World, and the Next

by gimmeabreak



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: -Ish, AU, F/M, Post-Canon, because these two need to be happy and i need the closure
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-14
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 09:08:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4131949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gimmeabreak/pseuds/gimmeabreak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is more than her title. She is more than her pain.<br/>This is what everyone sees.</p>
<p>"Is the Fade another world, lethallin?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Another World, and the Next

They do not speak, in the Fade.

There is no need to. Their thoughts waft around the crooks of their elbows, feelings intermingled, soft and tender and bruised, like air made of water: whispers brimming, murmurs of the damned.

_I will wait for you._

_It would be kinder not to._

* * *

She’s not the same person, Lavellan realizes, after the war.

None of them is.

There is less exuberance and less vivacity, less suppleness in the joints of her soul, but there is hope. More of it. There is a hushed breathlessness hovering overhead like an upturned sky where the tear used to be: there is living silence, and serenity, and contentment—and, for the moment, peace.

The same scars run across the hardened planes of her stomach, over the blades of her shoulders. The same eyes look out to the same world with the same mouth stretched wide underneath.

The same love beats out from her heart in a string of never-ending memories: a kiss, a dance, a broken promise.

(I love you, I miss you, Do you ever dream of me.)

Her anger is different. Dimmer, yet steadier, somehow. Older. Like the yellowed pages of an ancient tome, much thumbed and dog-eared, memorized by heart.

Wherever he is— _he_ , for she can’t bear to think of his name, not now—he must carry in him the memories they share, the points of contact between their lives before he walked away, held upright by grim determination.

He must. He does. He should.

This is what she tells herself.

(Will he forget? Can he?)

* * *

“You look pale.” Cassandra frowns, inspecting Lavellan through the fur of her lashes. “Are you—?”

“I’m fine.”

The frown deepens.

A sigh—from whom, she can’t tell. “I am fine,” Lavellan repeats, either to herself or to her friend. Old grass is flattened as she shifts, straightens her legs, feels the foliage tickle the underside of her knees.

“You think you can lie,” says Cassandra, leaning backwards on a tree, “but you cannot. Not well. Not to me.”

Dust drifts across shafts of leonine sunlight streaming through the branches. How lovely, thinks Lavellan, as she tears another blade of grass with her fingers. How very lovely.

* * *

But where do the homeless go?

* * *

There is an absence in her chest shaped like his voice calling her his heart, his heart, his heart.

It throbs when she starts forgetting: how tall is he again, are his eyes that far apart, does he really talk with a corner of his mouth higher than the other.

Because memories are unreliable, and hers is fluid. In her mind he is the intellectual apostate who closed his eyes and saw only what has been lost, and he is the feral lover who stole burning kisses in the dark, and he is also Solas, only Solas, he whose name is a whisper in the breeze, he who is made of secrets, he who is made of regrets.

* * *

Do you ever think of me, she asks him, in her heart of hearts. Does anything remind you of me, the way loneliness reminds me of you, and the howling wolves of your furtive pain, and the stars of the promise you made?

He gives no answer, in his heart of hearts.

He does not have it.

* * *

“Is it true, then?” Sera asks her, in a guileless way that twists her stomach into knots.

“What is?”

An audible scoff, the crunch of twigs and dried leaves underfoot. Silence that isn’t really silence. “Him. Lord Elfy Droopy-Ears. He’s gone, yeah?”

She guides her face into something resembling happiness and says yes.

“You’re a daft tit, aren’t you?” Sera huffs a laugh without humor. “It’s friggin’ fine to be sad. People _get_ sad. But you don’t blame yourself, right?”

“Sera—”

“Drinks later? You’re paying, of course.”

In an odd moment that has become rarer since the sky has healed, Lavellan smiles. “Sure.”

* * *

There is more to love than happiness.

There is more to love than lingering glances and subtle touches, there is more to it than growing old together.

She doesn’t know what, but this is what she tells herself.

* * *

What am I to you, she asks him, in her heart of hearts. Did I ever mean as much to you as you do to me, do you rifle through everything I’ve ever said to you, do you replay them all in your mind whenever—if you ever—miss me?

In his heart of hearts, he turns away.

* * *

( _Ir abelas_ , _Ar lath ma_ , In another world—)

* * *

She stares at herself in the looking glass and she thinks, I used to be young. Perhaps one day she will be young again, on the day of his return, if he ever does, when he gives her back the part of her he took with him.

The broken Inquisitor will be whole again.

She runs her fingers over her face, where his hands cleared the markings of a slave—and remembers his farewell afterwards, that stifling second when she could not even scream in anger for she was watching his eyes, and he refused to look at her.

* * *

Ellana endures. She is made for it.

* * *

They do not smile, in the Fade.

They speak with eyes that do not blink and she feels too frozen with his stare, focused with frightening intensity, that her breath stutters and the not-world around her shifts like a passing dream.

_Where are you, Solas?_

_I am lost._

* * *

“He didn’t say goodbye,” Cole tells her with a mouth that barely moves. “He wanted to, but he couldn’t.”

“I know.”

Skyhold is merrier, these days. From above, heads bobbing like a sea of hair. Orlesians, Fereldans, Marchers; dwarves and humans and elves, laughing, whispering, talking. Camaraderie, of the kind that congeals between souls surviving the impossible.

The people are no longer uncertain of seeing tomorrow: the sky is mended, an oceanic dome with the traces of a scar.

No longer green.

At times she wonders if the hope is false; the world is not safe, only safer. Life, after all, is never certain.

War or no war, Breach or no Breach.

( _Banal nadas_.)

“You are strong,” says the boy who is not a boy, the spirit who is no longer just a spirit. “But you hurt. His fingers warm on my face, I know a spell, he says; no matter what comes, I want you to know: what we had was real.”

Her heart tightens.

_What we had was real_.

But lies are as real as the truth, and the only promise he made he has broken—but he may unbreak it, one day, someday—

“You hurt and you feel bad about hurting. I am the Inquisitor, I will not be bowed, not by him. You wear a mask of strength and pretend it’s real when you don’t need one—”

“Cole,” she interrupts, turning to gaze deep into the eyes of the child who is no child, “thank you.”

* * *

_You warned me_ , she tells him, _and I didn’t listen_.

_Makes two of us_ , he says, and looks away.

* * *

A man without a home is not an easy man to love. Of this she is aware.

For he is the one who has walked the path of solitude, the dreamer who helped save the world he resents, he who has known so little of love and so much of hate that the slightest sliver of trust frightens him.

But Ellana endures. She is made for it.

* * *

_Is the Fade another world, lethallin?_

He closes his eyes and inhales the fumes of a broken heart.

(Whose?)

* * *

He is with a lion’s heart, the commander. On the battlements, looking down, clad in his furs and his armor, a Templar in all but name.

He speaks, eyes aimed below. “Inquisitor.”

“Commander.”

“It doesn’t end here, does it?”

“No.” She stops beside him, glances at what he’s watching: his own men, down below, within the circle of the sparring ring. Young men holding swords, limbs foreshortened. “If it ever ends.”

“Still, it’s a victory.” A deep sigh that tells of sleepless nights and wintry days. “And if there’s any victory to be had, I’ll take it.”

* * *

She is more than her title. She is more than her pain.

This is what everyone sees.

(“You wear a mask of strength and pretend it’s real when you don’t need one.”)

* * *

It’s Leliana who strides into her chambers two hours before daybreak and gives her the news.

“He’s back,” she says, and leaves.

That is all the spymaster says, and that is all Lavellan needs.

* * *

She sees him as he is in her memories: tall, straight-backed, regal. Hands clasped behind him like a man with nothing to prove. How does he see her, she wonders. Does he feel the tempest radiating from her, from the corners of her eyes, the pain of being left behind, the anger, the longing?

Does he read emotions on her face like a poem by candlelight—in a shaky script by some wobbly hand, on crinkled parchment, with the words tripping over each other, running together in blots of ink?

“What,” she asks him, in a trembling voice paler than moonlight, “am I to you?”

“My heart,” says he. “My home.”

* * *

There is more to love than trust.

There is more to love than secrets kept to protect, there is more to it than promises fulfilled too late.

She no longer knows what to tell herself.

* * *

“How?” he breathes, in a wanton moment of weakness. “How can you still love me, _ma vhenan_?”

In the cover of darkness, she turns away.

In the cover of darkness, she gives no answer.

For she has it.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Well. That was... confusing. But it's meant to be like that. I think. *shrugs*  
> 1\. Cole is hard to write.  
> 2\. I don't know how the Fade works. I am sorry.  
> 3\. omg how do you elvhen  
> Thank you so much for reading!


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